If you love Krazy Kat as much as I do, you owe it to yourself to dig into your pocket and buy this book. It’s the only Krazy Kat reprint that presents the Sunday pages in their original size. The book is huge and beautifully printed. The print run was limited, so don’t miss out.

James Montgomery Flagg is best known for his iconic recruitment posters like the one above, but he was also an accomplished magazine illustrator and cartoonist as well.

In 1890 at the age of 12, James presented himself and a group of sketches at the offices of St. Nicholas Magazine, the leading illustrated children’s publication of the time. He was shown to the office of one of the editors who looked at his drawings and determined that he showed promise. The editor praised the boy’s work and encouraged his parents to seek out art training for him. Flagg took classes at the Art Students’ League in New York, and within two years, he was a regular contributor to St. Nicholas, and Life magazine, and eventually landed a staff position at Judge. Alongside great artists like Grant Hamilton and Eugene Zimmerman, Flagg flourished, becoming one of the top illustrators of his day.

Flagg was very versatile, and his sketches of beautiful women were just as well drawn as his caricatured cartoons. He was outspoken and critical of the art community. He once said that "the difference between the artist and the illustrator is that the latter knows how to draw, eats three square meals a day, and can pay for them."

From 1903 to 1907, Flagg drew a comic strip for Judge titled, "Nervy Nat". It appears to be based on the early vaudeville perfomances of W.C. Fields. Here are some examples of the strip from 1906 and 1907.

Harrison Cady was one of the most famous and prolific cartoonists of the early decades of the 20th century. Although he is best known as the illustrator of Thornton W. Burgess’ Peter Rabbit series of books, and the cartoonist behind the newspaper comic bearing the same name, Cady was an active illustrator as well. His illustrations and comics appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, The Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Life, St. Nicholas Magazine and Boys’ Life.

These “bird’s eye views” are masterpieces of visual organization. Instead of just one overall composition, there are dozens spread all through the image. The amount of planning and pencil milage that must have gone into these complex images is impressive.

Animation Resources supporter, Jonathan Barli of Digital Funnies contributed these amazing scans to the archive database. Jonathan is hard at work on an important project- documenting and restoring early cartoons and comics in digital form. When I spoke to him about Animation Resources, he instantly understood what we are trying to do. Jonathan has donated high resolution TIFF images of his entire collection to Animation Resources.

Here is a selection of Cady’s Birds’ Eye View illustrations for Boys’ Life magazine…

Here is a similar format comic… "Right Around Home".

Dudley Fisher was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1890. He studied to be an architect, but dropped out to take a job as a layout artist at the Columbus Dispatch. After returning from WWI, Fisher created a comic strip called "Jolly Jingles". Year after year, he cranked out rhyming verse until he couldn’t stand it any more. In December of 1937 he decided to take a break from jingles and draw what Christmas on his grandmother’s farm would be like (if he had a grandmother and she lived on a farm!) He drew it as one big full page panel and readers immediately took to it and clamored for more. King Features picked up the strip and titled it "Right Around Home". These great Sunday pages date from early in the run- 1939.

When asked by a young artist what sorts of pens and paper to use to draw cartoons, Fisher recommended not worrying about things like that, saying "I feel certain that Michaelangelo could have done a masterpiece on meat wrapping paper with a toothbrush and shoe polish. It’s all got to come out of the artist- not the ink bottle."

I would like to thank the membership of The International Animated Film Society: ASIFA-Hollywood for sponsoring my efforts to get this project off the ground during its first few years. In particular, I owe a debt of gratitude to ASIFA-Hollywood's president, Antran Manoogian. Without his unwavering support and valuable guidance this project would not exist. -Stephen Worth